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Shamrock Rovers Head Coach Stephen Bradley gave a team update to www.shamrockrovers.ie in advance of Saturday’s away league game v’s Drogheda United (3pm kick off).

“We responded really well (in Dundalk) after the first 20-25 minutes maybe, especially in the second half I thought we were excellent. I think it shows the talent in the team that we were able to start again despite starting so poorly, massive credit to the players for that. We started to play our game, like we’ve done all season, we made better decisions in and out of possession and imposed ourselves on the game, which we didn’t do in the first half.

Ronan Finn’s second half performance typifies him, he plays with so much energy and drive and that was typified by the goal he created. It looked like he had nowhere to go but he dug out a cross to Brandon who is excellent around the box. If you look at the chances, someone cleared it off the goal line before that. We were the team pushing on until the sending off. You don’t like losing players in big games and were were disappointed obviously. If it stays 11 v 11 we had a good chance of winning. I don’t think there’s any doubt that we deserved a replay at least.

Drogheda will play with freedom and no fear, they’ve just been relegated so the shackles are off. They can go and play now so we’ve got to be ready for that, respect the game that it’s going to be and perform to our levels.

United Park is a tight pitch and out there earlier in the season we were poor, there’s no getting away from that. It was one of our worst performances of the season and we’ll be looking to put that right tomorrow. I think it’s plain to see, anyone who’s watched us throughout the season that we’re a different team to the one that played up in United Park at the start of the year. We’re a better side but it’s up to us to go and show that and put on a performance.

We’re not looking at Derry, we’re looking at ourselves, like we did when were behind them. It’s about us and concentrating on what we do well and we’ll end up where we deserve to be. There’s a few that are struggling with injury and Trevor Clarke is one of them. So we’ll have to assess them in the next 24 hours to see how they are.”